After surviving an assassination attempt and winning reelection with a clear lead in the popular vote, Donald Trump was – briefly, and for the first time in his political career – seen by many pundits as incarnating the future rather than the past. In his first months back in the White House, the radicalism and vindictiveness of the administration have given jitters to a lot of independents who were key in helping him win and hardened opposition among his longtime critics. Any fleeting sense that the MAGA movement was culturally ascendent appears, at least for now, to be gone.
And yet, the conventional wisdom holds that a broader ‘vibe shift’ is here to stay. Starting in 2013 or 2014, mainstream culture was for a decade dominated by the rise of wokeness, which can perhaps best be understood as a combination of a new left-identitarian ideology and a determination to expel anybody who violates its moral norms from the community of the righteous.
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